The Best High School Robot Builders Meet in New York City's FIRST Competition

Dean Kamen's FIRST Robotics Competition has been going strong for 20 years. In the 2011 New York regional, student engineers built competitive bots strong enough to withstand rough-and-tumble collisions in the FIRST arena, but agile enough to place inflated tubes on pegs.

The FIRST Robotics Competition that inventor Dean Kamen created more than two decades ago is about "gracious professionalism"—a way for teams of high school engineers to collaborate while building agile, amazing machines. But it's also about being the best. So at about noon on Sunday, most of the 66 student teams that had gathered at Manhattan's Javits Center for a weekend of competition sat biting their fingernails.

Alliance selection is where the FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) regional gets real. Only 24 of the 66 teams—the top eight finishers in preliminary rounds and the two teams that each chooses to play alongside them in a three-team alliance—would play for the championship Sunday. Senior Daniel Taut of Saunders Droid Factory, from Saunders Trades and Technical High School in Yonkers, N.Y., tells PM that teams lobby to be chosen. "We were in the top eight for a few matches," he says. "Teams would come around and say, 'Think about us. Remember us.'" For Shubham Singh, a sophomore at Herbert H. Lehman High School in the Bronx, the moments leading up to alliance selection are filled with anxiety and awkwardness. With his team's number 1230 painted across his face, Singh says the six weeks of blood and sweat and bleary-eyed nights that went into building Lehman's bot passed through his mind as he waited. "Some of the [team members] didn't sleep for two or three days," he says.

The final choice of allies is tough because the competition asks so much of the students—and their robots. For this year's competition, student teams face a trio of tasks: In the first 15 seconds of play, the robots—most of which resemble a self-powered cart with a single robotic arm sporting a mechanical claw—operate autonomously, moving down the enclosed court grasping inflated yellow rings that they attempt to place upon a wall of pegs. When those 15 seconds expire, the human drivers leap to the controls to take over their bots, which they then maneuver to hang more inflatable shapes. The goal is to build a horizontal FIRST logo: triangle, circle and square, in that order. For the third and final period, which lasts just 10 seconds, each robot may deploy a minibot—a football-size machine engineered to climb a metal pole under its own power as quickly as possible. The minibots that reach the top of the poles before the buzzer sounds score bonus points.

When selection time comes, Taut's team gets the call. So does Lehman Lionics, Singh's team, probably helped by the fact that its minibot (at least in the team members' humble opinion) is the "fastest minibot in New York City." In time, though, that claim will be tested by the speedy minibot brought by the Hawaiian Kids.

Jacob Garner, a sophomore at Waialua High School in Hawaii, flew more than 13 hours to compete in the Big Apple's FIRST regional competition. Sporting his team's uniform—a red Hawaiian shirt, naturally—Garner says that the chance to help design a robot was what attracted him to the program for the first time this year. "I heard that they had 3D," he says. "I do the 3D animation."

Circling his team's creation in the pit area before the afternoon matches begin, Garner points out the prize minibot: Its two wheels sitting side-by-side resemble those of a reel-to-reel tape recorder. When the main robot deploys it, the minibot's wheels grasp the metal tower and roll right up to the top, powered by a 12-volt battery. When it reaches the top, the flip of a simple household light switch releases the wheel.

A minibot that can reliably score points in the final period is a secret weapon. That's because the rest of each match, dominated by human drivers and the larger, 120-pound robots, is a wild free-for-all of banging metal collisions and flying inflated tubes. Taut tells PM that the best approach as a three-team alliance is to play two offensive robots and one on defense. When one member of his alliance—the all-female Fe Maidens of the Bronx High School of Science—suffer a busted robot arm, they remove it between matches and become de facto defenders, slamming opponents who are trying to score.

It is almost enough. Taut's, Singh's and Garner's alliances all reach the semifinals, but Saunders Droid Factory and the Fe Maidens are stopped there. Lehman Lionics and its two allies face off in a best-of-three final competition against an alliance that includes the Hawaiians. After two frantic games in which robots on both sides come heartbreakingly close to putting points on the board only to see the inflatable tubes float off their pegs, the Hawaiian Kids alliance emerges victorious.

In the pits, there's jubilation among the Plainedge Red Dragons, a team from Plainedge High School of North Massapequa, N.Y., who played with the Hawaiians on the winning alliance. Driver Jess Burg, a junior, joined the team because her older sister was a FIRST competitor: "I idolized her," she says. While the Hawaiian Kids dominated the minibot period, the Red Dragons had the advantage in the automated opening gambit when the robots drove themselves. Burg said their robot scored almost every time.

As with most FIRST teams, it's a constant struggle for the Plainedge engineers to gather enough funds to build and maintain their machine. "We really need sponsors," Burg says. "We don't have any." As a result, the team isn't planning to head to the FIRST world championships in St. Louis next month, even though Sunday's win qualifies them. Instead, they plan to enter two more regionals just for the thrill of competition.

During the celebration in the pits, the Red Dragons didn't appear too bummed about that. How does driving a championship homebuilt robot make Burg feel? "Awesome," she says. "The best."